Seeing architecture in everything

The book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig is no more about Zen than any other book, but it’s a good book and stuff I read in it keeps popping up every now and then. The book is autobiographical, although perhaps a little “fictionalized” – anyway, he tells the story about how he gets completely absorbed with defining what Quality is. It in fact drives him insane.

For a while I’ve been thinking about what software architecture actually is about. None of the definitions I’ve read feel satisfactory to me. So I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I kind of have a definition, although I can’t really express it in words. I think I’ll have to give a bunch of examples of what I think architecture is and isn’t.

This morning, after having read Serious Game (the Swedish original, Den allvarsamma leken) while brushing my teeth, I folded the corner of the page I was currently on, so I will remember where to begin when I continue reading. Doing this, I thought that this was “an architecture” for reading. Although it might seem strange, it’s true! But it made me think of “Zen and …” and how his definition of Quality gets more and more universal, and finally he realizes that his definition of Quality is equivalent to the “definition” of Tao in the Tao Te Ching. I felt I was heading in that direction with my ponderings on architecture. Let’s hope I don’t turn insane, though!